[TUTORIAL] How to make clean MEP transitions.

Some might ask what the hell do markers have to do with transitioning. Well it's pretty useful for the host to sync your track with the whole song. Since most hosts ask of you to leave a few extra seconds of footage, the track you send them doesn't necessarily start with the song itself.
Some air-heads might eventually change the volume and/or gain of the track while editing which makes it even harder to sync the track since you can't see the beats very well.


Let's say I have this MEP part I just finished editing and I left some footage for transition.
To put markers, hit the M key on your keyboard.
See how I put two markers: one at the beginning of the audio track, and one at the end of the audio track.
Now select the whole part of the timeline where you have all of your footage and hit Render.


You can untick "Render loop region only" if you don't have any media or clips placed somewhere else but where you have the track (no idea if this makes sense but yeah... you get me). You should keep "Save project markers in media file" ticked so it renders the markers along with the footage.


Once you render and import it, this is what you should get. As you can see, the markers are visible.
It's really simple but it makes it much much easier for transitions so I'll advise you to do that from now on.

Note: the markers don't stay if you encode your track so if you're asked to render in lossless or you usually upload directly from Vegas without encoding, this is a good option.

Chroma keying is my enemy, I'm telling you. I have literally NEVER used chroma keyer in my editing life and never really had to chroma key any mep part for transition.
I still know how to do it? lol.


Let's pretend I have this mask as a transition and I want to chroma key it.


People usually go for a green solid underneath the clips and render it and voilà. That's so wrong, oh my God.
Notice how the picture has tints of blue and yellow in it. It probably has some green as well. Chroma keying that would look pretty awful.
This is what I would do instead. Knowing there's a high chance frames are usually dominated by a single hue of color (blue-ish in this case), you will rarely find any tint opposite to that you have on the picture.
It's just a question of physics, to be honest. Well we're not in school, so I won't get deeper into this, lol.


Select the Invert FX and apply it to the frame, then right click on the solid color > edit generated media, then use the eyedropper tool to select a color from the inverted image. I decided to take the color from her eyes: that's where most of the blue hue comes from.
On the other hand, taking her skin color would be risky since her clothes are dark, so the dark that comes from it would be erased out when chroma keying.
This is only an example but it depends on what your picture looks like as well. Always try different colors; save the snapshot as a png and try the chroma key on it to see which color suits it the most.


You can see that the color I chose stands out pretty well in comparison with the whole tint of the picture. Let's chroma key that~ o/


Pretend that you added the chroma key and played around with the settings to get it to be as clean and neat as you can.
As you can see, the keying came out pretty clean and looks almost like the original mask. If you achieved to do this, be proud of you!
I still don't like chroma keying. It's not really visible since the frame are played pretty quickly so no one will pay attention to the little colored chips that say from the colored background but if you're a perfectionist like me, follow me to the third trick~

Note: you can use basically any method to chroma key that gives you a clean result. I just thought using opposite colors would work more efficiently (I came to that conclusion thanks to my physics class, I'm not kidding you) but there are other ways, you can just guess what kind of color isn't really present in the frame and base your chroma keying around that.

This is remotely the fastest way for me to make clean and neat transitions. It's really easy, just you see.


Leave only the mask with no background, nothing at all behind it (unless you mean to keep it, obviously) and hit render.
Select “Quicktime (.mov)” in the dropdown list and set it to “Default Template (Uncompressed)”. Render.


Now once you import it back on Vegas, whoops it has a black background to it.
Worry not, friend, this is where this trick is awesome. (;


Right click on the clip and go to Properties, then the Media tab.
Look for “Alpha channel” and change it to “Premultiplied”. It basically removes the background of the clip and it’s exclusive to .mov files (as far as I know, I tried with other formats but it didn't work).


As you can see, the background is gone and it’s as if the image was rendered out of Photoshop after you’ve masked it, you can see the tiled background, which means it’s basically transparent.
Yes, this is how perfect transitions should be made. >(

All you have to do is render the transition separately from the actual track and zip all the video files together to upload: it helps both with syncing and transitioning, which is why I love it.